What a classic showdown of opposites for the best-actress Academy Award: Reese Witherspoon as country singer June Carter in Walk the Line against Felicity Huffman as a man undergoing a sex change in Transamerica.
The two have dominated Hollywood's awards season over their fellow nominees, Judi Dench in Mrs. Henderson Presents, Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice and Charlize Theron in North Country.
At the Golden Globes, Witherspoon took best actress in a musical or comedy and Huffman won for dramatic actress.
Witherspoon's win over Huffman at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards seems to give her the Oscar edge. And it doesn't hurt Witherspoon's chances that Walk the Line is a US$100 million hit, while Transamerica is a modest arthouse success.
But the Oscars have a history of honoring the little-seen gender-bending flick over the big, splashy hit. Just ask Annette Bening and Hilary Swank.
Six years ago, Bening was the favorite as a caustic suburban wife in the wildly popular American Beauty. Like Witherspoon, Bening had won the Golden Globe for best actress in a musical or comedy and the SAG prize. Like Huffman, Swank had earned the Golden Globe for dramatic actress as a woman impersonating a man in the small art-house hit Boys Don't Cry.
On Oscar night, Swank won.
This year's nominations were the first for both Witherspoon, a Hollywood marquee name whose hits include Legally Blonde and Sweet Home Alabama, and Huffman, a respected stage performer who was largely a bit player on screen until her TV success with Desperate Housewives.
In the road-trip tale Transamerica, Huffman is a marvel of tics, shy glances, awkward posture and heartbreaking melancholy that underlies the sunny surface dispo-sition of a man on the verge of becoming the woman she always wanted to be.
It was the first film lead Huffman had ever been offered, and she has worked tirelessly to get Transamerica, shot on a tiny US$1 million budget, seen as widely as possible.
Two nominees already have Oscars, Theron as best actress for Monster and Dench as supporting actress for Shakespeare in Love.
Theron is an iron-willed tiger in North Country as a single mom who fights back against sexual harassment by male co-workers at a Minnesota mining company.
Before her remarkable transformation in Monster, Theron was known more as a gorgeous face than a serious actress, despite a solid performance in The Cider House Rules and twice co-starring in Woody Allen films.
With her second nomination in three years, Theron has established herself as a Hollywood heavyweight.
A five-time nominee, Dench is a perpetual heavyweight whether in Oscar-nominated roles for Mrs. Brown, Iris and Chocolat or playing spymaster M in the James Bond movies.
In Mrs. Henderson Presents, Dench is a delightful mix of dictatorial derision and fickle fancy, playing a society widow who launches a nude stage revue in prudish 1930s London.
Dench had a scene-stealing role opposite first-time nominee Knightley in Pride and Prejudice, the Jane Austen adaptation that was a throwback to old-fashioned period romances without a trace of modern cynicism.
A rising star best known for the British hit Bend It Like Beckham and the blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Knightley was luminous as Austen's heroine, a sly, wry, ahead-of-her-time woman who bucks her mother's efforts to marry her off for money instead of love.
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